Friday, September 13, 2013

Savagely Funny Advice

He may or may not have good advice
when he churns out his weekly "25 Ways To ..." posts.
Everyone's process is different, and what works for him might not
work for anyone else. But he's always funny. Very, very funny in a
savage way.

I wish I'd read this a year ago when I
started the final revision of Scurvy Dogs! a task I thought
would take a couple of months and which took almost exactly a year
(although it is a much, much better book for having done it. Man, I
wonder what I was thinking when I wrote half the original story. What
crap.)

To give a taste of his style (and it might be the most
important thing he says, about being merciless) here's his step no.
5, "Take Notes Like a Terminator."

"Your
own notes should be cold. Merciless. Equal parts Follow me if you
want to live and Your clothes: give them to me now. No
emotion. Just the icy crimson stare of a sociopathic robot hellbent
on fixing grievous errors (by driving a car through the front of a
police station, if need be). Don’t only use the time to highlight
stuff that doesn’t work. Highlight the things that do work, as well
— stuff that, to you, counts as components of the story that do
what they were designed to do. And okay, fine, if you want to drop
the emotionless edit-bot motif for a second, feel free to doodle
little happy faces or gold stars or tentacled elder gods giving you a
thumbs-up (er, tentacles-up) in the margins to indicate: I’m making
a note here — 'HUGE SUCCESS.'"

It goes back to what
Arthur Quiller-Couch said – Murder your darlings. Don't fall so in
love with your prose that you can't see whether it's doing its job,
advancing the story. Anything, no matter how clever, no matter how
amusing or beautiful to you, only belongs in the book if it advances
the story.

Or, as Sean Connery's character says in
Finding Forrester (my favorite movie about writing,) "You write
the first draft with your heart. You write the second draft with your
head." And what he doesn't add, but maybe should have, is your
head has to be clear and cold. The only thing that matters in that
revision is what works and what doesn't, and there are no free rides.
If it doesn't work, it has to go.

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About Me

Co-founder of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I'm a pirate and a writer, earning a living as a reporter and editor for an online news source while trying to write novels. I'm working on my fifth right now.In that time, I have kept a writing log, jotting down notes after the day's work is finished. I've decided to put it online as a blog, if for no other reason than to save the cost of a new notebook.